By Dennis Doyle, MFA student in Art Practices and Sculpture and Post Studio Practice,
Nicholas Shapiro is an Assistant Professor in the Society and Genetics Department at the University of California at Los Angeles. Shapiro is a multidisciplinary researcher who analyzes and designs interventions into chemical pollution and climate change. At UCLA, Shapiro heads the Carceral Ecologies Lab, a multidisciplinary environmental research lab that studies toxic living conditions, and the complicated role that science plays in accountability processes within carceral institutions.
In the following interview, Shapiro talks about the values of the Carceral Ecologies Lab, how he develops relationships with community members, and building communities of care and accountability.
“...I think we can use abolitionists’ insights and values to get beyond that, that feeling that these environmental evils are necessary.”
In the opening section, we discuss the abolitionist and community centered values that underpin Shapiro’s work and that of the Carceral Ecologies Lab.
D: How have your background, identities, and experiences informed your research in community engaged work?
N: I think my family has been a really big influence on the kind of work that I do.
Particularly, I would say, my mom and my sister. I guess professionally my mom’s an American history middle school teacher who doesn't actually teach ethics, but she says that she's an American history and ethics teacher. So weaving ethics into looking back at the history of the United States. And then my sister is a community organizer back in Atlanta where I grew up. She has the “community partner” perspective. She's also very tired of a lot of traditional academic approaches to community engagement.
I think both of those perspectives together influence the kind of consideration that I give to my work with community. The way that I attempt to listen. Also specifically to some of the topics. My sister was doing abolitionist work for a long time and basically organized me into coming back to studying carceral facilities, after having done some of that in my undergrad.
So yeah, openness to being organized by your family members was definitely part of my specific approach.
D: That's a really awesome connection. Family members definitely have a specific relationship in which there's a sense of admiration and connection and then also are people who feel comfortable applying pressure to really challenge you and push you in certain ways.
N: Yeah, that was something that I was talking with one of my students yesterday about. She’s just graduated so she’s trying to figure out at what point she feels comfortable enough organizing her more than nuclear family. Is this the long game? Is it a 10 year game? When can I agitate and do I do it at my graduation party? Is that appropriate? These are definitely some of the questions that a lot of us in the lab are asking ourselves.
D: So, what are your values, theories, or worldviews and how do you put those elements into practice in your work with communities?
N: I think that abolition is key. I’m not sure if it's a value. It's a key pragmatic approach to systemic change that I learn from listening to my community partners that are dealing with prison industrial complex abolition. I'm trying to bring that same largely black-lead, critical thought to environmentalism.
I think environmentalism is so adamantly invested in reformism that any kind of environmental critique is just so readily co-opted and ends up optimizing harm rather than preempting it. And so that to me is part of the struggle of the lab. It is to get beyond what Eyal Wiezman calls 665 . It’s the forever hovering at an arbitrary quantification of harm right under the number of the beast: 666. I think that's sort of where modernity lies: just under some arbitrary threshold of the unbearable. Whereas I think we can use abolitionists’ insights and values to get beyond that, that feeling that these environmental evils are necessary. So how do we make them unnecessary becomes the question.
My lab has other values. Critical environmental justice, which is a term that David Pellow articulated, is helping dial in the specificity of the kind of environmental justice that we advocate for.
Accountability is key. Accountability is another value. I think across my work on environmental injustice and criminal punishment system injustice, accountability is a common problem. On one end of the spectrum you've got the under-inspection and enforcement of the state and corporate polluters and on the other end we've got this hyper-policing and incarceration of communities of color. These are the ends of the spectrum of accountability failures in the US. And so I think there's shared lessons across both of those. I think we're struggling with issues of safety across both. What does safety look like? How do we achieve safety? Those are part of the key failings of both ends of these accountability systems in the US.
And then humility. Humility and solidarity are also our values. So sometimes, you need to put a social media campaign together to hype someone's GoFundMe and that's what the work looks like as opposed to just crunching the numbers or doing the interviews or whatever your research is looking like. That's what we did for one of the community members who lost her child's father in jail a few years ago. Running a GoFundMe to do legal support was what was necessary in order to do that research as well. How do you stabilize the community members so that they can engage in this next level of struggle which is research?
D: A follow up question to that: Thinking about ideas like 665, what are your values when you think of future and futurity? In a world that has fixed ecological damage or with systems that are extremely oppressive and heavy, how do you think about protecting values into the future?
This is sort of paraphrasing something that Murphy said at the end of 2016 when we were on the verge of the Trump administration dismantling our environmental protection apparatus. But even at that point, the end of the Obama EPA was funded at 1980s levels so it wasn't actually as good as one might think. But I think it's in moments of acute crisis that we need to not triage out radical change.
I think there are some ways that these prevailing reformist logics triumph in these spaces. But we know that reformism is escapism. And in many instances–I’m not saying always, but often in criminal injustice reforms and often in environmental reforms–we are so focused on reformism to the extent that we can't understand it empirically. And we see that these interventions and large scale changes that are deemed non-practical, but they are actually practical, just the conventional definition of practical is overly constricted.
And so it's really an investment in a specific imaginary of what is feasible and practical and I think art has a really big place in potentially dislodging this stubborn conceptual limitation and helping us experiment and create alternative imaginaries that really end up being potentially more impactful than the instrumental reformist interventions that really define the problem incorrectly.
“...to think more deeply, to research more broadly on better protocols for aligning these different values of academic production and community knowledge production.”
We moved the conversation next to focus on how Shapiro’s work with community partners. We discussed ways to break down the boundaries around academia and critically defining what success means in community engaged research.
D: To the next question, how do you build relationships with your community partners and how do you maintain these relationships beyond and after your collaborations.
N: I think the key is knowing that there is no model, at least for me. That there are different ways that communities can be involved in research.
For example, one project that we're doing involves looking at how the medical examiner coroner system in Los Angeles County is leveraging biomedicine as alibis for an unaccountable sheriff violence. So we are looking at how black deaths are being naturalized by medical examiners. And that's a research project that the community came up with. They came up with the idea, they got the data, and they were like, “Do it.” So that's one version. Another version is coming up with some basic ideas and then finding the right community partner to advance it and make sure that they're helping to set the agenda from early on, even if it's not from the very beginning. Sometimes you can involve the community in an advisory role, where you're paying them for their time just as an advisor and then, once you get a bigger grant, you can pull them in and be co-PI’s along with you.
And then I think, crucially, it's breaking down the division between the community and the lab and actively recruiting students from the communities that are being studied. My lab is largely women of color. We also actively recruit from something called the Underground Scholars Initiative, which is the system impacted and formerly incarcerated student organization. So I think when there's not a clear divide between the lab and the community, then that's where the work starts in terms of community engagement. Dissolving that divide allows for relationships to be built in different ways. For example, one of my students ended up becoming true friends with one of our community partners, because they both frequent a place that is a few blocks away from each other. LA is a big place so having people that are just a couple blocks away from each other is extraordinarily rare.
That's sort of an overview, but I think what is most important for me in the development of my abilities to engage the community is to actively work on my ability to listen and to create the right venues for listening. So I love the activist approach or the organizing approach of listening tours and listening sessions and having the desires of the community be able to be articulated even prior to some instrumental grant application or technology development.
I think staying open to constantly refining this process: it's exhausting absolutely exhausting. That last question is a good one, I don't have a good answer to it. But I think we're at a really exciting moment where we are getting beyond hyper-rigid, checkbox-style collaboration procedures to more dynamic protocols that are more directly generated by impacted communities. So I think it's a very exciting moment to be doing this kind of work.
D: I’m thinking about that boundary of the lab and breaking that down. In academia, that boundary is often a wall that's put up. Do you ever find resistance from the institution of academia, or that the community's relationship with academia is sort of a mistrust of that boundary? Do you find resistance to breaking that down?
N: Sometimes. There's a bunch of stories that come to mind. I think that there are all kinds of small bureaucratic ways that the university makes it impossible to do good community engagement. Once, I wanted to have a community advisor that was just going to come and talk for two hours and I’d pay them $250 an hour for each of the two sessions. The university wanted eight forms filled out and I didn't have the time to do it for them. It just was so disrespectful for them to have to spend at least as much time filling out forms and creating scopes of work and everything then actually delivering their advice for two hours.
So there's like this absurdism, there's this surrealism of what the university expectations are that I encounter over and over again. Sometimes you know I'm working with extremely structurally marginalized students and there's a lot of obligations and care work that pulls them out of the lab. So sometimes it can be outwardly difficult to get the work done when people are just trying to survive and the research isn't the priority. So not being punitive about that, within the lab is really important. Having lots of second and third chances in the lab are really important and also articulating our abolitionist values.
Sometimes I get pulled into other people's fights. I am pulled in by community members to help understand the way that researchers are weaponizing accountability structures within the university. So like saying a community didn't have the right resources in order for them to hold the data that was extracted by the University. So, the institutional review board, which is based upon helping community individuals have autonomy, won't allow data to be shared to a community as a whole in this specific misinterpretation of it. So those are the actual weaponization of accountability structures or there's auditing of community group’s expenditures in a way that they don't actually do that kind of record keeping. All those are tools of power control. Those are things that I don't experience in my lab and my university, but they are things that community partners have experienced elsewhere. They're really clear violations of ethical engagements with communities that are happening through the very tools that are meant to ensure ethical behavior.
D: Going off of that, do you have an experience of an unanticipated experience or outcome when doing community engagement? How did you respond and what takeaways do you have from that time?
N: There's so many stories and it's hard to even think about what is unexpected because much is. But I think sharing failures is really important, so I think I'll go there, as opposed to some of the triumphs that we like to tour around.
One is that I was called into this community in South Georgia next to the world's largest biomass facility. Biomass is basically taking largely trees and making them into pellets and then shipping them to Europe. For a long time their climate change mitigation policies said that burning biomass was carbon neutral, even though you’re clear-cutting the southeast US to do it and also burning wood.
But there are a lot of illnesses surrounding this biomass facility. I'd been working on formaldehyde and they read a paper of mine and called me down there. I'd been working with these engineers on developing inexpensive indoor formaldehyde tests. So we ended up applying to this NSF grant to further this low cost formaldehyde test kit, but it was designed for indoor uses. And the primary indoor sources are not the outdoor sources: they're materials that build your house. So, in this slow lumbering process of applying for an NSF grant I was postdoc and I lost track of a lot of the community's interest in outdoor air and what was coming from the specific facility in the advancement and development of our technology. So there's this mismatch between testing indoor air, where it could be products they brought into the house or could be the construction materials of the house, and the community organizers real desire to pinpoint what was coming from the biomass facility.
So I think that's an instance where we were helping to understand acute exposures in the place that people breathe the most and at the same time as we weren't really answering the community's questions. I think that neither of us fully articulated that problem until we were a year in and the money was almost gone. And I didn't even have money in the grant for a site visit, so I funded it through another source and I couldn't come back to do more testing. So I think that's a moment when I really came to understand the ways that universities can advance themselves off of the cachet of environmental injustices, without necessarily fully responding to environmental justice in the terms of the community.
So that was a really profoundly sad engagement for me, that, even though on the surface it's super successful. We did the testing, we did find some of these homes to be at hazardous levels, we worked on mitigation of those problems. We got our scientific paper out and the technology is going to soon be available. But fundamentally we didn't answer some of the key questions that the community wanted. And you're not always going to be able to do that–and that's important, to be able to communicate you're not going to be able to answer everything. But I think what we answered was so askew of their fundamental questions that I think that we let them down and that was an unexpected problem of listening and study design. I feel like most problems come down to listening and study design. That's where, like, all the politics of science lay. Well not all of them, but much of them.
So that early misalignment was really fundamental for me to think more deeply, to research more broadly on better protocols for aligning these different values of academic production and community knowledge production.
“And that's had the most profound impact: creating systems and culture where people can care for each other, where it doesn't all fall on me.”
To end the interview, Nick discusses how he shows care to himself through creating a culture of care within his research team.
D: And then, our final question, so our cohort has been talking a lot about the Audre Lord quote of “Caring for myself is not self indulgence. It’s self preservation and that's an act of political warfare.” How do you maintain your own health, motivation, and self while giving to others? You also talked about how that also might apply to your lab and community?
N: This is honestly something I struggle with. So thank you and your colleagues for recentering it. I think that one of the key ways that I care for myself is by…
There's a lot of students in the lab, you know. It's 20 young minds. And this is on top of my research agenda as well, some I do on my own and some I do with them. And on top of teaching. There's a lot of stewardship of people that needs to happen and it's one of the main reasons I don't grow the lab any further. I don't feel like I can fully care for everyone if we go any larger. So the way that I sort of got over my crisis of care for them, where I was just last minute responding to everyone else's needs, was to create a structure and a culture within the lab that was decentralized from me and allowing people to ask questions of each other and do peer review and to create this culture of an interdependence that allowed for support to happen in many more directions. And, I think, also created a place where people are genuinely friends and genuinely care for each other in ways that are both motivated by their common investment in the work but also exceed it dramatically.
So that's been you know that's the most thing that i've done for myself. And that's had the most profound impact: creating systems and culture where people can care for each other, where it doesn't all fall on me.
D: The ways in which that self preservation is built in and that it's connected to another person too in one way allows you to help someone else, but I think also that reciprocal relationship sort of allows you to accept that help and care from someone. That can be hard, especially in academia, where there is that idea of individualism and that desire to do it all by yourself. That high achieving individualist culture doesn't always allow for care from others to actually enter into your orbit.
N: Absolutely. And then sort of doing that they end up taking care of me. In the background is a bouquet of flowers that had all of these really sweet notes in it that they gave me. That was really buoying at the end of a pretty brutal quarter that just ended.
So yeah, the self preservation was freeing up time for them to care for each other and then also, like you're saying, accepting support in places that the hierarchies of academia don't usually recognize sources of care. All the time there's all these informal extraction of care by people of higher up the hierarchy, but for it to emerge in these sort of small and not demanded ways and not expected ways was a beautiful unexpected outcome of this structure and culture.